"Big" Re-alignment

[Beet]

jhsu asked 'Why aren't presidential races as national anymore?' In trying to answer, I came up with a theory of "big" re-alignment.

The basic idea is that a big trend you see is Republican support has become geographically much more broadly based. Just look at the Atlas map: a sea of blue.

Up until the middle third of the 20th century it was very simple that the Democrats were the party of the South and the Republicans were the party of the North. At that time, the Democrats had no chance in many Northern states and the GOP had no chance in the South. The West was competitive, but it simply was not relevant in most of this period because it was an extremely immature region with no clout. The real regions of the nation were the Midwest, Northeast, and South, and most of those regions were pretty solid for one party. Hence, presidential campaigns in that 1865-1928 era were no more "national" than they are today; change usually focused on a few critical states, although for the most part the Democrats were locked out based on regional structure.

Since then, what's happened is the North-South split has been replaced by an urban-rural split. The Democrats are now the party of the cities while Republicans are the party of the countryside, put crudely. The Republican majority is built on its advantage in the suburbs, which is now the big swing "region".

This is what I call the "big" re-alignment. The "big" re-alignment theory reflects a view of the FDR coalition not as a traditional political base but recognizes its exceptionalism as an inherently contradictory coalition reflecting an ongoing party transformation. That coalition was merely part 1 of this transformation of the North-South divide becoming the urban-rural divide. The "GOP Southern" re-alignment is part 2 of that transformation. What is traditionally seen as 2 separate re-alignments, I see as a single re-alignment spanning from 1928 through the present day.

So while elections may seem less national towards the end of this "big" re-alignment than they did during its process (1930s-1990s), they are no less national than they were prior to the beginning of the "big" re-alignment, that is, the 1920s and before.

[Beet]

Do you think that many former southern Democrats are now neocons?  I don’t know much about the development of the neocon movement.

I think they follow their leader. And the opposite goes for the left. A majority of both sides would not be on the side they are on if Gore was the one attacking Iraq.

[Beet]

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RJ, I think you've basically spelled out the traditional wisdom. I'm not challenging the idea that there was a distinct dominant majority coalition in the 1932-68 period, replaced by another distinct majority since 1968. In that sense you can say there were two realignments.

However, it's also known that there are some interesting characteristics of these coalitions that do not exactly fit the simple "after x date, team A controls these areas and groups and team B controls others" view.

For one thing, critical re-aligning election theory posits that there is a single election in which a new majority suddenly emerges. We know that this is not true with the creation of the most recent GOP majority. We can adjust this to say the new coalition emerged during several years, such as 1928-1936 or 1978-1984, but even this leaves major problems.

For example, as early as 1928, at the same time that the "New Deal" coalition first appeared in some parts of the country, the GOP made major inroads into the South that it did not make since the end of Reconstruction. Then in 1948, the South launched a full-scale revolt, and the "solid South" was never quite so solid after that, not even in the 1950s or in Carter's win. Yet 57 years later, in 2005, the Dixiecrats still control the state legislatures of four Deep South states. Clearly, this has been a long-term trend that cannot be demarcated by any single date, 1968 works for presidential elections only. Further, there is substantial overlap over the two coalitions.

The second thing, the New Deal coalition was hardly a unified coalition. While under the same party, it was marked by sharp ideological differences that manifested themselves as early as John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner's revolt in 1939. These differences exploded onto the national stage in every Democratic presidential victory other than FDR during this period (Truman, Kennedy, Johnson). And even with FDR, had his personal gravitas and the international situation not been so favorable (Germany launched its blitzkreig during a critical period in the 1940 Democratic convention when Garner was challenging FDR), he may have seen a major split in the party as well. It is clear this 'coalition' was rather unusual and especially divided.

Overall, the Democrats were the party of the South from Reconstruction up to 1928. With the nomination of Al Smith in 1928 and the rise of the new white ethnic groups to political influence within the Democratic party in Northern urban machines, the party became bifurcated into a Southern component and an urban component. However, the Southern component has gradually abandoned ship to the GOP, while the urban component has gradually strengthened. On the other hand, the GOP, once the party of the Northeast and Midwest, has gradually become the party of rural areas. The graduality of this dual process, spanning seven decades and continuing, defies any sort of analysis that sees no connection between the process that began in 1928 and is continuing to this very day.

Why might party divisions change from North-South to urban-rural? One explanation might be due to the ascendancy of artificial economic structures replacing natural ones. Regions are certainly a natural economic order. In an agricultural society, they determine which crops can be grown, and hence the type of labor, capital, and organizaiton needed to grow it, and hence the order of the society. Hence, the primary divide of the nation became North-South, based on the South's growth of cash crops as compared to subsistence farming, and the South's easily traversible rivers as compared to the importance of canals and railroads in the North. Artificial economic structures on the other hand, are very different... industrial structures are organized primarily in a hub-and-spoke network. With the appearance of things such as air conditioning and the erosion of the agricultural basis of the economy, regional differences between to disappear. A Ford or Toyota, or a microchip, can be manufactured just as well in Michigan or Alabama. Services can be performed just as well in New York or Florida. But services need customers, and manufacturing requires infrastructure for delivery.

Hence, the primary economic divisions of society are now based on the urban hub and the outer contribubatory spokes. These are the artificial "regions" that we have created; regions with different interests, experiences, and concerns. This may have a great deal to do with how parties have also evolved.

[Beet]

My thinking as to why the New Deal and the GOP south are two seperate realignments is I don't think there are common elements as to why the two occurred. First, the urban-rural divide isn't exactly what led to the GOP winning the South. Although the GOP made certain advancments in the South before 1968, the Democratic party was clearly the dominant party at least until 1960. There are also certain states that don't exactly follow the urban-rural splits as you described; the infamous "exceptions to the rule." Here in Ohio, this state(to me) clearly leans Republican, and there are a few good size cities here. I live near Dayton, about 60 miles north of Cincy. Dayton is a strong liberal town, but Columbus and Cincinnati are good GOP bases. The cities in the north of the state are democratic in nature, but the average is thrown off by Col, Cin, and some of the more densly populated counties in southeast OH. Wisconsin has a population density more favorable for the GOP than Ohio's if you follow the rural-urban rule. Iowa's is similar to Wisconsin's, however both  lean Democtaric. Texas and Georgia, however, are strong GOP states and both of them have big cities. I'd guess about 15% of Georgia's population is in Atlanta. In comparison, I'd say a similar portion of Wisconsin's population is in Milwaukee, yet it is opposite Georgia's position. My thinking is there is something else that caused the South to go Republican, and that had nothing to do with the New Deal or the Urban-Rural split theories. I also don't think the urban-rural theory holds a lot of water in the midwest or the old border states with the exception of Illinois or perhaps Michigan.

It has been suggested that the state governments in the south being democratic is a remnant of the days when the Democrats dominated the south. I think it has more to do with the fact that certain states in the south are per capita well below the national average income wise. While southerners may prefer GOP "values and standards," they prefer the democratic party's more leftist economics. I'll reiterate that the Democrats were the party of the South long after the New Deal and I don't think it was the New Deal realignment which changed that.

It may be a bit of a mistake as you suggested to draw points in history and say"this is how it was before, this was how it was after." The divisions in the New Deal Coalition is also something I'm not familiar with and probably should look into. Still, I think there were two distinctly different realignments going on. I'd make my case further, but I don't want to rant anymore than I already have.

Some good points.

I don't have a particular definition of realignment, when I said that I just meant a shift in the relative bases of the parties' support based on some identifiable variable.

The GOP clearly did not take the South due to the urban-rural divide directly, or immediately. At first civil rights and later, social liberalism are the actual substantive issues here, which I recognize. However given the fact that there was only one Democratic party, I want to explain how two different constituencies developed within the same party, one which pushed "liberalism" and the other which represented a region. What were these two constituencies based on? I clearly see the liberal element as based around northern cities, around white ethnics, and around Catholics, at least initially. Hence, look at the importance of Al Smith's nomination. And you had the same type of competition within the Republican party between the traditional northeastern base and the South/West coalition that got most of its support in the suburbs outside of the cities, though I'm less clear about this.

I'd also say that Wisconsin as a whole is moving towards the GOP, so the differential between itself and Georgia will merge in the long term... of course this depends on Georgia stabilizing. I can't prove my hypothesis but I believe Wisconsin will move towards the GOP and Georgia will stabilize. Look at the Atlanta area, not just the city but the suburbs, and they are clearly stabilizing compared to the rest of the state. The surge in Bush support last year came mostly from outside Atlanta and the immediate suburbs. Wisconsin on the other hand is getting closer each time, considering Nader.

I am not too familiar with all of the local conditions around the country, in fact I have only lived in one place my entire life. I can only look based on county data in certain places. In Ohio for example, I look at Dave's map and see that Cuyahoga, Summit, Franklin, Montgomery, and Hamilton are colored the darkest in the population map, the last three which correspond to Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati, and they trended Democratic in 2004 by 4.48%, 3.51%, 8.23%, -0.44%, 5.87%, respectively, while the state as a whole trended Democratic by 1.40%. So Dayton trended a bit more Republican, but the other 4 places trended significantly more Democratic. In Indiana on the other hand, the state trended Republican by 5.05%, but Lake by only 3.18% and Marion where Indianapolis by -3.23%, where the differential between the parties was the worst for the GOP since 1964. This could just be the result of population movement, or any various other factors.

Thats all for now.